RE: questions about encodings

[James Rentz <JAMES@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I do not know if this is the same problem, but our original database
conversion had numerous problems along this line. For example, the German
umlaut can through as a Subscript 4. We found that we had to go in and
manually change the diacritic values through the full screen editing
capability. 

There is a table of "Diacritics and Special Characters" in the INNOPAC
manual for the correct values. Using this, and some test exports of the same
record from OCLC, we established a conversion table to use for correcting
the entries. Using the example above, we changed the {210} (Subscript 4) to
{232} (Umlaut)

It took awhile as this had affected both our bibliographic and authority
databases, but at least now the records are now searchable. 

James Rentz
Manager - Technical Services
Rockford Public Library
215 N. Wyman Street
Rockford, IL  61101
(815)965-6731 x136
james@xxxxxxxxxx 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Schupbach ,Mr William [mailto:w.schupbach@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2000 9:00 AM
To: 'innopac@xxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: questions about encodings


I put these questions to the Autocat list, as they are not only about
Innovative products, but having received no reply I'm now trying them out on
Innovative users.
When first installed (last year), the Wellcome Library's Innovative web opac
did not show words with diacritics (e.g. accents) or diphthongs correctly:
the words were corrupted with capital letters, exclamation marks
etc.Therefore we switched to output in Unicode UTF-8, which, when consulted
in Internet Explorer with Fonts set to "Universal Alphabet UTF-8"or in
Netscape with Encoding set to "Unicode UTF-8", does render most of the
European diacritics successfully. On the catalogue terminals in the library
(PCs), Cyberbit software has been installed in order to deliver Unicode
UTF-8, rather than Western as it was before. That's fine. 
However when the patron goes out of the Wellcome Library catalogue into, for
example, the web catalogue of the college next door, which does not use
Unicode, the characters in the outside catalogue appear as corrupted. The
name Moliere (grave on first e), for instance, has a Chinese character in
it. Patrons have to know that they must change the encoding to Western (but
how can they be told?). If they do change the encoding, and the same or a
different patron then uses the same terminal to consult the Wellcome
catalogue, the characters in the Wellcome catalogue will appear corrupted,
because the encoding has been set to Western. The manual re-setting
overrides the Cyberbit instruction. The patron must manually reset the
coding back to Unicode UTF-8 (but, again, how can they find out that they
need to do this?). In practice, most of the on-site patrons see corrupted
characters without any explanation, and do not know what to do about the
problem. We do not wish to restrict their ability to consult outside
websites, as we regard the web as a single pool of information. 
How have other libraries handled this, in terms of how people consult other
sites with different encodings? That's the first question. 
The second question concerns remote users. We know that some of them,
possibly all, are seeing corrupted words.  Has anyone managed to deliver the
correct encoding to them by using software? Has anybody done it by placing a
banner on each page saying something like "To view this page, use the
setting View>Encoding>Western". If so, please tell me the URLs. 
A third question concerns words which, even in Unicode, are still corrupted
in the web opac. These include many transliterated Arabic, Hebrew and
Persian words. If anyone has any advice as to how these could be shown
correctly, we should be grateful to learn. 
The ordinary browser Default encodings do not reset automatically, by the
way.
I've looked at a few good Innopac sites such as SOAS, London University,
Ohiolink, the San Diego Library Consortium, and Bryn Mawr, without finding
any solutions.  Thanks for any help.
William Schupbach
Wellcome Library
183 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE
England
e-mail w.schupbach@xxxxxxxxxx
library catalogue http://library.wellcome.ac.uk
(To view catalogue, use Netscape browser View>Encoding>Unicode UTF8, or
Internet Explorer View>Fonts>UTF8) 

[Registered charity no. 210183, Trustee registered in England no. 2711000]


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